Amartya Sen: from Santiniketan to the Nobel, economics for human welfare

A school that valued curiosity

Sen was born in 1933 in Santiniketan, on the campus of Rabindranath Tagore's Visva-Bharati, where his grandfather Kshiti Mohan Sen taught Sanskrit and Indian culture. His family came from Dhaka, where his father Ashutosh Sen taught chemistry at Dhaka University. He spent three early years in Mandalay, Burma, and much of his childhood in Dhaka, before moving to study at Tagore's school.

In his Nobel autobiography he writes that the school encouraged curiosity rather than competition, and that interest in exam grades was firmly discouraged. Between the ages of three and seventeen his chosen subject changed from Sanskrit to mathematics to physics before he settled on economics.

Two experiences from those years stayed with him. From Santiniketan he watched the Bengal famine of 1943, in which two to three million people died, and noticed that it struck only the poorest, such as landless rural labourers. In Dhaka he saw a Muslim daily labourer, Kader Mia, who had been knifed during communal riots after going out to look for work because his family had nothing to eat. Sen writes that the experience was devastating for him.

“I was born in a University campus and seem to have lived all my life in one campus or another.”

— Amartya Sen, via NobelPrize.org

Calcutta, Cambridge and Delhi

He studied at Presidency College in Calcutta from 1951 to 1953, taking a B.A. with economics as his major and mathematics as his minor. In early 1952, at eighteen, he was treated for cancer of the mouth with heavy radiation. He recovered and kept studying.

In 1953 he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, which enrolled him for a second B.A. because he was still in his late teens. He received his doctorate from Cambridge in 1959. Before he turned 23 he was asked to set up a new economics department at Jadavpur University in Calcutta. A Prize Fellowship at Trinity then gave him four years of freedom, and he used them to study philosophy.

From 1963 to 1971 he was a professor at the Delhi School of Economics. There he worked deeply on social choice theory, the study of how the views of many individuals can be combined into fair decisions for a society. His book Collective Choice and Social Welfare appeared in 1970.

Famines, poverty and the Nobel

After Delhi he taught at the London School of Economics, Oxford and later Harvard. From the mid-1970s he worked on the causes and prevention of famine, leading to his 1981 book Poverty and Famines. The Nobel committee explains that he challenged the view that a shortage of food is the main cause of famine, showing that famines had occurred even when food supply was not much lower than usual. What mattered was whether different groups of people could actually buy or obtain food.

He also helped his old friend Mahbub ul Haq develop the United Nations' Human Development Reports, which take a broader view of development than income alone.

On 14 October 1998 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded him the prize in economic sciences for his contributions to welfare economics. It said that, by combining tools from economics and philosophy, he had restored an ethical dimension to the discussion of vital economic problems. That year he became Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.

The skills and habits that made the difference

The first was asking questions from life. In his autobiography he links the famine he saw, and the labourer who died after going out to find work, to the questions about poverty and deprivation that he went on to study.

The second was building strong tools. He studied mathematics alongside economics in Calcutta, and his work on social choice draws heavily on mathematical logic, so that ideas about fairness could be examined precisely.

The third was learning across subjects. He spent his fellowship years on philosophy, and the Nobel committee pointed to exactly that combination of economics and philosophy as central to his contribution.